Monthly Archives: December 2015

YOW! Melbourne 2015

I was lucky enough to attend YOW! in Melbourne last week, here is a braindump of what I went to.

 

Day 1

It’s Complicated…

Virtual Teams: Making Them Work

Interesting talk on Virtual Teams (Not remote teams). A Virtual Team is where (ideally) everyone is remote. Some takeaways:
Almost everyone in the room used Slack.
When there is an office and some people remote, if the people in the office all go in to a room to have a call with remote people, this will make the remote people feel even more remote as the people together will have a conversation between themselves that they can’t really be a part of.

Rethinking MVC with React Native & ReactiveCocoa

React Native is a React Framework for doing native looking mobile apps using javascript and React.  It looks pretty awesome.

ReactiveCocoa is a React style framework for Cocoa UI, also looks pretty awesome.

Pragmatic Microservices: Whether, When and How to Migrate

This was an excellent talk. Randy went through lots of things around moving towards a microservice architecture, recommend watching this one back when the vids arrive.

Production Haskell

Sustainability Supporting Data Variability: Keeping Core Components Clean while Dealing with Data Variability

Another really good talk, talked about how they added lots of custom logic and processing to their app without making it a mess.
Spoilers: Preprocessing data, hook points to allow specific extensions and validation.

Frugal Innovation and Scaffolding software

Really good feel good talk on innovation in Africa, when the video comes up make sure you watch it!

Thriving in a Stochastic World

Good talk for teams that try optimise for reliability in their process.

 

Day 2

Using Formal Methods to Eliminate Exploitable Bugs

Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On

Really Really good talk for anyone doing scrum, Slides are online but don’t make sense by themselves, watch out for the video.

Talks about the human-improvement side of this process, writing down what skills people think they have and what they’d like to improve on. Forming scrum teams based on the work that needs doing rather than trying to fit the work to the team.

Facebook’s Product Infrastructure

Talked about how facebook is just a giant hack and they like it that way.

Making Hacking Child’s Play

Really entertaining talk on how easy it is to hack poorly made sites.

Deploying and Scaling Microservices

The Future of Software Engineering

Good talk about the practice of Software Engineering. Everyone talks about how Software engineering isn’t real engineering, but when you delve in to it it turns out it is.

Designing for Failure: Scaling Uber’s Backend by Breaking Everything

Interesting talk about failures that Uber has had and how their architecture ended up like it is.